In 1996 the US passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which deregulated radio ownership and established section 230 (which basically allows social media to exist by making companies not liable for content third-party users post online), the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which introduced work requirements into welfare, and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, which, among other things, permitted the cooperation between local law enforcement and what is now ICE. I’ve written a bit about how these pieces of legislation have created the reality we’re living in today in 2026.

British music journalist David Stubbs also agrees that “we’re still living in 1996” (140). However, his book 1996 and the End of History focuses exclusively on the UK context. Instead of grungy, rap-rocky alt rock, there’s Britpop, Oasis in particular. And instead of grievance at gender and racial minorities, there’s nostalgia for purportedly pre-PC times when the monoculture was led by white guys with guitars. “1996, in other words, was the year in which cultural forces gathered, as if in a manifestation of the collective unconscious, to recreate the year 1966, before the slide into hippie decadence and misplaced idealism really began” (7). Oasis was perceived to be like what people in 1996 thought The Beatles were, i.e., a point of national pride and unity, a symbol that gave the British people (well, the white, mainly English, mainly men ones) a sense they shared in a project where the UK was leading the world.

This longing for a sense of cultural unity unperturbed by questions as to who actually constitutes the “we” in the collective whose unconscious that unity manifests is a form of reactionary centrism. As Stubbs explains, this was an attempt to use shared culture as a substitute for something like the common good: “In this era, despite the continued craving for shared experience and the banishment to the peripheries of the remotely experimental or futuristic, the ‘centre’ has nonetheless collapsed: in politics, music, and TV, all victims of various deregulations and disintegrations” (20). As privatization swept across British society, experiences of membership in a common public waned, and Britpop conveniently emerged as an “alternative” (see what I did there) to civil society and its psychological affordances (which, notably, were designed to center precisely the same people the Britpop narrative did).

According to Stubbs, Oasis arrived at a time when the pendulum had already been swinging back from its left swerve in the 80s, a time when “rock was to be considered a pejorative term, a hidebound and reactionary form, the guitar a phallic symbol loaded with the dead weight of rock history and overbearing, hetero maleness” (124). The expansive musical and gender expression in 80s genres like New Romanticism, goth, synthpop, and new wave generally emerged precisely as an alternative to mainstream white cishetero rock masculinity. In my WOXY book I wrote about how 80s music critics framed modern rock as queer. As Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant told Rolling Stone in 1988, “It’s kinda macho nowadays to prove you can CUT IT live. I quite like proving we CAN’T cut it live. We’re a pop group, not a rock and roll group” (Cited in Goodwin, “Sample & Hold”). Highlighting a compilation now well-known as the foundation of indie-pop, Stubbs points to a “mid-Eighties rut of deliberate smallness, as showcased on the NME cassette compilation C86” (124); this “smallness” could be reframed today in the language of “twee,” a heavily feminized term typically applied to women artists like Tiger Trap. Traditional cishet white rock masculinity was far from fashionable in the 80s.

However, when Nirvana broke the American mainstream, the pendulum started to swing hard back to the right, where white guys rocking out to guitars took center stage. Britpop was the UK’s attempt to align with that movement and get their domestic scene swinging in the same direction as the American one. As Stubbs puts it,

Couldn’t it be like the Sixties again, when it was basically just The Beatles, the Stones, groups ‘we’ were all into, and so were all our mates: big white guitar music confidently ruling the roost? Nothing against synths, nothing against ethnic minorities, nothing against women, nothing against gays, but they had their time, back in the Eighties. All those subcultures, subcategories, all that eclecticism and experimentation…blokes, guitars, that’s the essential rock’n’roll experience when it comes down to it, isn’t it? And why aren’t we getting that? (127).

To be clear, Stubbs is snarkily voicing an opinion that is not his, but which was what he claims as the prevailing attitude regarding Britpop in the mid-90s. This is not quite the vehement misogyny and racism of American-style affirmative action backlash, but a slightly more polite version of white masculine chauvinism that thinks white cishetero men and their preferences should drive pop culture.

“None of this was exclusively Oasis’s fault,” Stubbs claims, “the recrudescence of conservatism was a structural phenomenon” (135). Britpop was a beacon of a broader vibe shift not just in British culture, but Global North Anglophone culture more generally. My work on alt rock and the alt right points to some of the structural factors at work in the US, and Stubbs’s account of Tony Blair’s candidacy and administration points to equivalents in the UK. Stubb’s book was published a year before the Brexit vote, but you can see the straight line from 1996’s “why can’t British music be by and for white guys?” to the idea that the UK is only for a certain kind of British person.

Stubb’s book is very helpful in situating what’s going on in the transformation of American commercial alt rock radio into a space of reactionary masculinity and masculine grievance in a broader, trans-Atlantic context where the political and cultural pendulum is swinging in a parallel direction. The forces of deregulation, privatization, and backlash against feminism, immigration, and the like each operate in specific national contexts, but the US and the UK are roughly on the same track and headed in the same direction.

Stubbs notes that this conservative turn in British musical culture led audiences to crave music that’s effectively slop - frictionless music that basic white people can lose themselves in because it affirms all of their preferences and biases. For example, he argues that Pulp’s “Common People” was a hit because

its lumbering anthem [was] precisely what an emotional and fatigued public wanted: simply to fall into each others’ arms and sing along, rather than keep pace with drum’n’bass or trip-hop or Romo or The New Wave of The New Wave or minimal techno or whatever new subcultural permutation was being shouted at them from below’ (129).

AI produces slop because it’s only capable of generating new-to-us versions of the same stuff it’s been fed - it can’t have an original idea and just reheats other peoples’ nachos to deliver an already-familiar experience. Though Stubb’s book was published nearly a decade before generative AI would be widely available to the public, the aesthetic he attributes to Britpop could describe AI slop equally well. Noting that most of Oasis’s lyrics, like the comedy of the era, “say nothing much about anything” (129), Stubbs hits on the fact that this slop mimics the experience of people structurally insulated from the trials and tribulations of history; the frictionlessness of the slop aesthetically represents the frictionless way in which middlebrow straight white men had been able to navigate the postwar era.

I’m still trying to figure out the broader direction for this “alt rock to alt right” project (the article version is forthcoming in American Music, pub date tbd), but thinking about this more trans-Atlantically has been helpful.

I have written a lot about the fact that contemporary American popular culture (note that’s 5 links to 5 pieces) is increasingly shifting away from the political ontology that subtends both Western Enlightenment aesthetics (what Ranciere calls “the aesthetic regime of art”) and classically liberal social contract theory and towards one that prioritizes things like private responsibility, private individual preference, the performance of bad taste as a rejection of society and its potential normativity. The traditional ideals of bourgeois good taste, sensus communis, and so on, are out, and we’re figuring out what’s now in.

Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy is also about this shift: on page one, she notes “the social activity of representation is slackening.” Elsewhere she remarks that corresponding ideals like disinterestedness and fine art - aka “creative distance from ordinary communications or banal functionality” (5) are likewise falling out of fashion. Similarly, the classically liberal ideal of the “abstract equivalent” (4) is on the wane; the subject of the “Ethical Substance” section of The Phenomenology of Spirit, the “abstract equivalent” is the civil person who is formally equally to every other civil person by virtue of their separation from private differences (like gender, or more accurately, femininity) - think “one person, one vote.” All of these phenomena are thought to embody objectivity and universality because they exist at the level of civil society, the public sphere, or however you prefer to frame this realm separated out from the world of private difference and social reproduction.

Fine art is likewise universal because it is separate from the private sphere of social reproduction and its pesky tethering to material necessity (you can’t make a cup and saucer with fur and expect people to like drink out of it, but it sure looks good under plexiglass at The Art Institute). As feminist art historians of the 1970s pointed out, the fine art/craft hierarchy is nestled in the public/private distinction of classical liberalism.

In place of subjective universality, disinterestedness, the sensus communis, and all those other aesthetic concepts rooted in the political ontology of the classically liberal public/private divide, Kornbluh locates “immediacy”. For her, immediacy is “affective transfer” (2), “directness and literalness…immersiveness” (5), and “atomistic absorption” (15). Examples include “immersive” art happenings, social practice art, streaming video, and autotheory.

The “immediacy” Kornbluh identifies is a psychoanalytic one. In all cases, lots of mediation happens to produce the subjective experience of psychoanalytic immediacy. For example, Kornbluh argues that “all this [algorithmic] personalization upholds a permalingering mirror stage, a fortress of the imaginary, minimizing the possibility for mediations of the other” (128). My psychoanalytic theory is certainly rusty (I think the last time I published anything in that area was like 2010?), but her basic idea is that there has arisen a class of aesthetic experiences that lack the capacity to demonstrate to a perceiver that their experience is not an unbroken continuous whole with the rest of the universe because they lack a representation of something that is not the self (such as one’s mirror image). “Immediacy’s metaphysics of presence chafes against representation” (11), she writes. Note the use of the phrase “metaphysics of presence” - I’ll come back to this later - immediacy is the experience of being, pure being, unbroken by representations of otherness that might suggest to the perceiver that they are not fully present to or knowledgeable of themselves (e.g., that they might have things in their mind that they’re not conscious of).

As someone not at all invested in the psychoanalytic concept of self or consciousness, the book felt a bit like a top-down application of a concept to popular culture: the psychoanalytic theory was in the driver’s seat and the examples came along for the ride. Methodologically lean toward another kind of analysis: music analysis, where we break down how a musical text or performance or recording works to understand what the parts are and how they all work together (and why we think that works, sounds good, etc.). My work tends to be fairly bottom-up, where I start with an analysis of a cultural object and build a theory up from there. That’s what I did in Resilience & Melancholy with the soar, and that’s what I do in the vibes book, where I look to how things like recommender algorithms “think” (i.e., what kinds of mathematical models of probability they build and how those models are structured) and then found a philosophical model with a similar epistemology (it’s phenomenology). If recommender algorithms are doing phenomenology with math, then the critical phenomenological tradition provides a wealth of resources for both critiquing what’s wrong with that way of thinking and model better, more just was to do it. So while I do agree with Kornbluh that the phenomenon she identifies as “immediacy” exists, but I don’t think it’s a problem for the reason she thinks it’s a problem because I don’t really have a horse in the psychoanalysis race.

In popular music studies, what Kornbluh calls “immediacy” is described more in the same terms that the tech/UX world uses to describe their ideals, namely, “frictionless” experience. In the tech/UX world, “friction is any element that makes users stop and consider their options in experience design.” If something in an interface makes a user step out of the task directly at hand and reflect on themselves and the interface, that’s friction - it impedes the efficient use of the interface by making people stop and think. This is Heidegger’s broken hammer for the age of platform capitalism.

As Liz Pelly explains in her book on Spotify, from about 2017 until very recently, the platform’s main aim was to keep users constantly tuned in so they were continually harvesting data from them. To do that, they had to reduce any friction that might cause someone to press pause, close the app, and stop listening. This quest for frictionless UX led Spotify to something quite different than immediacy, however. As Pelly puts it, “the quest for a frictionless user experience resulted in a deluge of frictionless music” (40). She interviews many workers in the music industry who all note that Spotify actively promoted (e.g., by putting on popular playlists) “chill inoffensive” music that sounded like “emotional wallpaper” (83). This was music for “soundtracking” one’s day, on in the background as one does other things. Far from immersive immediacy, this so-called “lean-back listening” is more of a void than a plenum. This is most evident in Pelly’s reporting on the platform’s understanding of what constituted “chill”: “Anything can be chilled and repurposed in the economy of passive listening…Another source told me that no one internally could agree on what ‘chill’ meant--that it was so ambiguous, it had ‘no definition that is meaningful’” (53). As I explain in Good Vibes Only, “chill” is a profile that can be applied to any style of music; it has no definitive features, just a signature alignment among whatever set of features one may be working with in a given song. Put differently, chill has no essential determinate properties. Chill’s void of clear and distinct meaning echoes Spotify’s approach to frictionless listening: empty music out and reduce it to more or less nothing.

Lean-back listening is the determinate negation of immediacy: they’re both produced and motivated by political economies of platformed algorithmic recommendation, but in one context (music) we have experiential nothingness and in the other (Kornbluh’s take on streaming video) we have experiential immediacy. Whereas my friend and colleague Dan DiPiero claims that the Spotify sound is “the aural equivalent of the kind of image flattening that Kornbluh writes about, where sounds become meaningless placeholders for our distracted need for noise in the background,” he’s both right and wrong at the same time. Lean-back listening and immediacy are dialectically related: on the one hand, there’s being, pure being, so full and unbroken that it’s…absent specific identifiable features…which makes it identical to nothing, pure nothing.

This same-but-different relation between being, pure being, and nothing, pure nothing is the subject of the first chapter of Hegel’s Science of Logic. There’s “being, pure being, without any further determination. In its indeterminate immediacy it is equally only to itself.” This is being as pure undifferentiated presence. However, lacking differentiation, “it is pure indeterminateness and emptiness. There is NOTHING to be intuited in it…Being, the indeterminate immediate, is in fact NOTHING.” Pure being is void of qualification. At the same time, to the extent that “nothing IS (exists) in our thinking” it is “empty intuition and thought itself, and the same empty intuition or thought as pure being.” To be so full as to have no differentiation is the same as to have no discernible content - being pure being is nothing pure nothing. As examples of pure being and pure nothing, immediacy and lean-back listening/chill embody the same dialectical relationship Hegel identifies in their exemplars.

So the question of whether Kornbluh’s immediacy thesis applies to popular music is: yes and no. Music is a context where what she theorizes as a plenum and full presence emerged as a void. Platforms and their personalization algorithms absolutely contribute to the erosion of anything like a sensus communis (which, for the record, was not great to begin with and basically a theory of white masculine superiority) or a common distribution of the sensible. But they don’t necessarily or inherently push users towards fast, immersive ~being~. 2025’s biggest song is basically empty slop designed to soundtrack whatever poignant social media moment TikTok or Instagram users want to share at a particular moment. In popular music the style of late capitalism is nothing.

***

There’s a philosophical reason why music can’t exhibit immediacy in the way Kornbluh theorizes it in the 21st century. At least in the Western tradition, music was thought to be an immediate expression of physical reality back in the eighteenth century; as Derrida’s Grammatology sort of intuits, music’s moment with the “metaphysics of presence” was back when people like Rousseau and composer/music theorist Jean-Phillippe Rameau were debating whether harmonic function should be tied to the order of intervals in the overtone series.

I said Derrida sort of intuits this because he gets the stakes of Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages correct, but he misunderstands which side of those stakes Rousseau himself comes down on. Tl;dr - Rousseau and Derrida actually agree more than they disagree.

This is the subject of the second chapter of my first book, so I’m going to stick to the main point and let you look there for the details. Before he was known as a philosopher, Rousseau was known for his work in music. His beef with Rameau was the Kendric v Drake of its day, and the substance of that beef was whether the principles of music theory should be derived from the physical properties of sound, or whether they were cultural (or “moral” as Rousseau describes it). Rameau was arguing for what became the model for tonal harmony, which orders the harmonic syntax of Western classical music according to the order of intervals in the overtone series: the octave, the major fifth, the major fourth, etc. Parodying Rameau’s argument Rousseau summarizes: “Gentlemen, he would say to them, if we are to philosophize properly we must go back to the physical causes” (EOL 285). Rameau argued that this system was universal because it was natural and unmediated by culture - it’s based in the (supposedly objective) physics of sound. Rousseau argued that “nature” itself is a cultural construct and all musical perception is learned and cultural - i.e., mediated. Rousseau writes,

Physical observations have occasioned every kind of absurdity in discussions of the fine arts…by itself a sound has no absolute character by which it might be recognized…the power which music exercises over our souls is not the project of sounds…[but] moral effects [which] also have moral causes” (EOL 290/284).

Rameau was arguing for the immediacy of quote-unquote “nature,” and Rousseau countered with cultural mediation. That’s what Derrida gets wrong: in the Essay and all the musical writing that preceded it (Letter on French Music, Examination of Two Principles, etc.) Rousseau is not team presence, he’s team mediation and culture.

Charles Mills calls this era of Rousseau’s writing his “non-ideal” period, where, unlike in his later writing on contractarianism or education, Rousseau is arguing against forms of abstraction that naturalize patriarchal racial capitalist epistemologies (Contract & Domination, 96). So if this early Rousseau feels inconsistent with the later, more famous Rousseau, it is!

Rameau wanted to argue for the unmediated character of tonal harmony because the only way the emerging classically liberal thought of the day permitted the existence of hierarchies was if they were natural. Civil society and the public sphere were supposedly universal, disinterested, and equal; differences and inequities existed, but in the private sphere. For music to be a fine art, it needed to demonstrate fine art’s definitive capacity to be universal, objective, and free of overt bias; any existing biases, inequities, etc., had to be rooted in nature, like for example they thought gender and racial difference was.

So the project of musical immediacy is in fact tied to the 18th century classically liberal public/private distinction, not to its 21st century obsolescence.

My work on alt rock and the alt-right is focused very explicitly on an American context rooted in decades of right-wing backlash against a set of federal policies about employment and education opportunities referred to as “affirmative action.” Originating in Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925 (1961), affirmative action was intended to correct the distributive injustices created by centuries of racism and sexism by giving preferential treatment to white women and people of color in things like college admissions or the awarding of federal contracts.

As I explain in my forthcoming article in American Music, Cheryl Harris’s 1993 “Whiteness as Property” explicitly addresses affirmative action backlash, which by that time had been in the courts for nearly two decades. Lawsuits such as Bakke vs. The Regents of the University of California treated affirmative action as a kind of personal injury claim, reframing the political distributive issue as a private property infraction. In US tort law, for a plaintiff to be liable for injuries another person suffered, those injuries have to come directly from the plaintiff’s actions or negligence. Anti-affirmative action suits argued that present-day individual white men weren’t directly responsible for historical racism or sexism, so the opportunities affirmative action denied them actually made these men the victims of lost wages and opportunities. THEY were the ‘real’ victims of personal injury here, they claimed. Harris claims that these anti-affirmative action lawsuits remade whiteness-as-property around personal injury.

This legal and cultural milieu re-made mainstream white masculinity around victimhood and personal injury. Modern rock had long been what Lauren Goodlad called a domain of “men who feel and cry.” While that used to be a subcultural alternative to strong, hard, and stoic mainstream white masculinity, affirmative action backlash re-made mainstream white masculinity into terms compatible with modern rock’s typical sadboys. This is why alt rock crossed over when it did - not because of any changes in music or musical taste, but because it suddenly fit with a kind of masculinity mainstream bros identified with.

You can read more about that claim in my article when it comes out next year.

But one thing I didn’t really get to develop is that British neoreactionaries looked to a different part of the post-punk tradition for a different mechanism of performing white identity. Christopher Haworth’s study of the so-called “Dark Enlightenment”’s use of British industrial music zines from the 1980s and 1990s suggests that European neoreactionaries like Nick Land similarly were influenced by and shared affinities with alternative rock broadly construed. Drawing on industrial musicians like Psychic TV’s use of sublime escoterism and occultism, these Dark Enlightenment figures evoked a “whiteness [that] manifested in the protection from harm it provided to authors and artists to immerse themselves in the anti-rational, abject, and censored-including explorations of right-wing escoterism or the supernatural thinking that informed the Third Reich” (Hayworth 231). This music confronted listeners with all kinds of dis-order that threatened to overwhelm them, but this functioned like a test against which Dark Enlightenment denizens could prove their strength and rationality.

In enlightenment philosophy, aesthetic sublimity was the experience of being nearly overwhelmed by a stronger physical or intellectual force (like the Matterhorn or the idea of infinity), only to remember that one’s reason (i.e., one’s white masculinity) was an even more formidable force. As Kant (author of “What Is Enlightenment?) explains,

If something arouses in us, merely in apprehension and without any reasoning on our part, a feeling of the sublime, then it may indeed appear, in its form, contrapurposive to our power of judgment, incommensurate without power of exhibition, and as it were violent to our imagination (Crit of Judgment, 246).

The feeling of sublimity is tied to the threat of being overwhelmed by something “unbounded,” and thus transgressing the limits of our capacity for thought or reason. Kant is clear that “the sublime must not be sought in things of nature, but must be sought only in our ideas” (250) because natural things are objects of sensation rather than (purely) thought. For example, the idea of infinity is sublime because it transgresses any human idea of number or counting. However, when we realize that the idea of infinity is potentially overwhelming our capacity for reason, we also have proof that our capacity for thinking is more powerful than our capacity for sensation, because we can think and imagine things that are bigger and stronger than anything we could sense. As Kant puts it, “sublime is what even to be able to think proves that the mind has a power surpassing any standard of sense” (251). The feeling of sublimity is evidence that the human mind is stronger than anything else out there in the world.

In enlightenment aesthetics, discussions of race and gender pervade theories of the sublime. Kant, for example, thinks women and “oriental” men should not be able to experience the sublime. As Christine Battersby explains, for Edmund Burke, “the sublime that threatens to overwhelm the male ego via a form of mental rape that trenders him (temporarily) passive” (7); perhaps unsurprisingly, Burke also claims that the sight of a Black woman is enough to spur an experience of sublimity (A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of The Beautiful and Sublime, 144). In both cases, Burke understands the experience of the sublime as an encounter with challenges to white masculinity. As Battersby explains, the point of this encounter, and why it ultimately feels good in the end, is that it’s a chance to prove the strength and resoluteness of one’s white masculinity: “the ego encounter[s] ‘nature’ or a ‘feminine’ other, and then re-establish[es[ control via a return to a self that is confident in its underlying freedom, its mastery of otherness, and in the (male) poet or philosopher’s right to speak and be heard” (16). As theorized in the regular-degular Enlightenment, the sublime is an experience whereby the inner individual conquers feminized, non-white challenges to its white masculine identity and supremacy.

It’s not hard to see why white supremacist Dark Enlightenment figures would jump on this sort of theory of the sublime: it is literally a narrative of white masculine supremacy. Haworth’s article shows how post-punk and industrial music provided fodder for experiences of sublimity, which then feed DE politics: by talking about all this weird disgusting and nominally transgressive stuff, DE writers and their readers get to perform the white masculine supremacy they seek to platform politically.

This is something very different than what’s going on with the American alt-right’s use of alt rock. As my article shows, as the 90s unfolded the explicit politics of bands like Creed and Limp Bizkit - and the Clear Channel stations and DJs that platformed them - are directly aligned with what will be alt-right grievance culture: they perform the exact white masculine personal injury that we will later see echoed, for example, by manosphere influencers. Second, while the DE’s use of the sublime functions mainly at the level of the metaphysical, the alt rock/alt right use of personal injury is directly about private property in a very non-metaphysical and non-metaphorical sense. Instead of demonstrating reason’s incapacity to be transgressed by the irrational, the American alt-right claims that their property entitlement has been transgressed by women, feminists, immigrants, etc. There’s also a class difference: the bands and zines cited by DE figures in Haworth’s article are quite subcultural and typically require a certain amount of cultural and educational capital to be familiar with. 90s alt rock, however, is kind of THE definition of lowbrow. Chris Molanphy calls that period “Possibly the most loathed period for music of the last half-century.” So even though the British Dark Enlightenment and the American alt-right look to the post-punk tradition for aesthetic and political inspiration, they look to very different parts of that tradition for very different narratives and concepts.

In the last few weeks Warner Music Group and Disney have partnered with AI firms, and this has left many to fret about “losing human creativity” to AI.

We need to be very careful how we frame “human creativity”, because as scholarship in a range of fields has shown, any time you try to define “the human” in terms of essential qualities or capacities, it’s impossible to fully capture all of the actually living persons that we would commonsensically call human, such as disabled and impaired people, intersex people, people practicing non-Western cultures and their values, just to name a few of the most common exclusions. If you say the thing that defines humans is “language use,” then human babies and some disabled people don’t count but non-human primates who can use sign language do. For the same reason, it won’t work to try to find some objective property of human creativity that distinguishes it from AI. Human creativity is so diverse and varied that it even, in for example the case of Thomas Kinkade, basically mirrors AI slop. Compare Kinkade’s “Rosebud Cottage”

To this AI-generated image on Freepik

We can assume that Kinkade’s body of work has been used to train these image generators, but the point is Kinkade came up with this cheesy stuff all on his own! With his human brain and creativity! There is a lot of human-made slop out there, some of it, like Kinkade’s, is even extremely practiced and refined.

When it comes to distinguishing between “humans” and AI, existential phenomenology offers what I think is the most helpful and accurate toolkit. Specifically, I think Beauvoir’s distinction between “being” and “existence” can distinguish between people and artificially intelligent machines: AI has being, but it does not exist because it’s not a mutual participant in the co-creation of existence.

As an existentialist, Beauvoir thinks that humans have no essential being, i.e., that human “being is lack of being” (13); that’s her way of saying something like “existence before essence (aka being).” Because I have no essential being, I can shape my existence in any way my situation facilitates. For example, human bodies can’t fly like birds or swim like fish, but by working together we figured out how to build airplanes and SCUBA diving equipment; we considered the material affordances and limitations of typical human bodies and figured out how to make them fly and dive. Rather than treating the facts of typical human embodiment as an essential, fixed form of being, this perspective understands these facts as contingent situations that can be worked with and through. This is what Beauvoir means by the idea that humans “lack being”: there is no singular, universal, fixed, eternal, unchangeable human reality. However, humans are real: we exist. And our existence’s contingency and malleability is possible because we lack being. As Beauvoir puts it,

this lack has a way of being which is precisely existence. In Hegelian terms it might be said that we have here a negation of the negation by which the positive is re-established. Man makes himself a lack, but he can deny the lack as lack and affirm himself as a positive existence. He then assumes the failure [of being]...However, rather than being a Hegelian act of surpassing it is a matter of a conversion. For in Hegel the surpassed terms are preserved only as abstract moments, whereas we consider that existence still remains a negativity in the positive affirmation of itself. And it does not appear, in its turn, as the term of a further synthesis. The failure is not surpassed, but assumed” (13)

Note the distinction Beauvoir makes between “surpassing” and “assuming” a lack of being. To surpass or sublate (Aufheben) the lack of being is to cancel out the tension between being and nothing by positing another form or level of being. On the other hand, to assume the lack of being is to acknowledge it and not cancel it out; to exist is to have a reality that is not being. Existing (an active process) is not being (a static state). In Beauvoir’s system, existing consists in doing things in the world, changing and re-orienting ourselves and our situations. In so doing, i.e., in existing, we negate a present state of being and create another one. An affirmation of a negative, assuming one’s lack of being consists in acting upon the fact that one has no inherent, immutable reality by changing one’s present situation and creating a (slightly) new reality. Whereas Hegel and most of the Western philosophical tradition take “lack of being” as a bug in need of fixing or resolution in some higher order of reality, Beauvoir considers it to be the defining feature of human existence: existing reorients a present state of being into something else.

In claiming that humans “lack being,” Beauvoir’s model cannot be made to endorse or frame any particular mode of being as more legitimate than another. Being is there to be negated in acts of existing, which reorient the world in new ways. What matters is existing in ways that are oriented toward…existence itself, or the act of negating a present state of being and creating a newly-oriented one. Because individual existences are enmeshed with one another, orienting my actions to the diminishment of others’ existence also diminishes my own, and orienting my actions toward my personal existence also orients them to the existences of others. In the Beauvoir scholarship, this orientation is called “moral freedom.” The language of freedom points to the non-essentialist character of existence: lacking being, existence has no necessary features or determinations limiting its future directions. This freedom is moral, however, because human existence is, in Beauvoir’s ontology, inescapably relational: my own freedom depends on the capacities of others to exercise theirs. As Arp notes, “If one acts to curtail others’s freedom then one cannot achieve moral freedom” (28); a freedom that fails to orient itself to the freedom of others fails to be moral not because it fails to meet some external moral standard, but because it fails to fully orient itself toward freedom/existence. Beauvoirian existence cannot itself be taken as a legitimating ground because it has no being to legitimate. Framing existence as ambiguously both individual and common, Beauvoir’s ontology creates a system of accountability that can operate in the absence of legitimating values such as “the greatest good” or “virtue” or “life.”

Our actions orient the world that we share with other people. Because each action is oriented more positively toward some and more negatively toward others, we are accountable to all in our individual choices. For Beauvoir, oppression prevents people from genuinely assuming their existence, i.e., from being able to negate a present state of being and create a new one. For example, recent attempts by U.S. higher education institutions to criminalize student protest impede these students’ ability to have a say in what sorts of things their institutions invest their money in, such as weapons manufacturers. These protests are an attempted exercise in moral freedom: they are actions in service of negating a present reality (that their school sends money to make weapons of war) and create a new one oriented less towards the military-industrial complex and more towards decoloniality. By criminalizing this protest, U.S. colleges and universities prevent their students from contributing the exercise of their moral freedom to the mutual orientation of humanity’s existence. Oppression diminishes human existence at both the individual and the general scale. Thus, because Beauvoir’s existentialist ethics holds that there are no absolute, universal values beyond the fact of human existence itself, oppression is uniquely condemnable because it is oriented directly against existence.

Human existence is collaborative and mutual: my existence is oriented to and oriented by others’, and we are all responsible to one another for our contributions to our shared reality. AI cannot take responsibility for its outputs. People respond to those outputs, and in this respect AI can impact our shared existence, but only insofar as it inspires someone to do something. AI doesn’t have the moral freedom that humans have. And this moral freedom is rooted in our social and political orientation to one another; the thing that humans have and AI does not is society. In other words, the difference between humans and AI is not biological or cognitive or related to any objective feature or characteristics of either us or them; it’s a political difference rooted in AI’s inability to be responsible and thus be in community. To the extent that people start to rely on things like chatbots rather than on one another, AI is a form of bad faith that actively erodes human existence, i.e., society.

I don’t think AI meets Beauvoir’s other criterion for existence: it is not capable of negating a present reality and creating a new one. First, it can’t do anything actually new or original. It generates probabilities based on patterns in past data. It can recombine its inputs, but it cannot negate those inputs and put out something different from them. For example, I’m sitting here at my laptop writing, but when I get up to let the dogs out I negate my present reality and push my reality along another vector. AI can’t do that: if all it had in its training set was sitting at the laptop writing, it could just come up with iterative variations on that. Unless it had some data about standing up to let the dog out in its set, it’s not going to suddenly generate that as an output.

Because AI can’t convert being into existence by negating its present reality and creating a new one, it lacks the capacity to participate in the mutual creation of existence. Like Beauvoir’s figure of the child, AI-resurrected grandma “escapes the anguish of freedom…her whims and her faults concern only her. They do not weigh upon the earth. They cannot make a dent in the serene order of a world which existed before her, without her, and where she is in a state of security by virtue of her very insignificance. She can do with impunity whatever she likes. She knows that nothing can ever happen through her; everything is already given; her acts engage nothing, not even herself.” Just as children playing house aren’t making decisions or actions that impact anything outside that play scenario, AI-resurrected grandma lives in a playspace separate from the messy real world of human existence. If living people act on her advice, they face the responsibility and consequences for acting on information generated in a play-world.

AI may function in a play world, but the machines that run it have a very real material impact on the world. But that impact is not the result of the AI’s choices - it’s the result of all the companies deciding to build huge server farms that gulp up all our water, much in the same way that cows who fart methane into the atmosphere at quantities to impact greenhouse gasses aren’t responsible for their existence at that scale, agribusiness is.

We are bags of meat stuck here on this rock together - and it’s that together that defines us. That’s a political and social definition, one grounded in moral freedom. AI does not share our reality because it does not exist together with us - it just has being.

In mid-October 2025 author and journalist Talia Lavin argued “we should bring dadaism back as a response to The Horrors. It made sense during world war one.”

In its original context, Dada used artistic expressions of nonsense to show how the violence of WWI transgressed the norms and boundaries of shared consensus reality so spectacularly as to render them meaningless. For example, nonsense prose is a way to artistically represent literally unspeakable violence; it invokes a formerly shared reality as something that has been illegitimately transgressed or destroyed by state violence.

Though Lavin locates Dada as something that happened over a century ago and has yet to have a revival, there’s a much more recent and local example USians can look to as we figure out how to respond to the secret police disappearing people and National Guard troops deployed across blue cities: the new wave band Devo.

Formed in Akron, Ohio in the late 1970s, Devo was a direct response to Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale’s presence at the May 4, 1970 shootings at Kent State University. Netflix’s new Devo documentary covers this in detail, but the band has been very outspoken about this for a long time. Twenty years ago, Casale gave an interview to the Vermont Review where he said:

All I can tell you is that it completely and utterly changed my life. I was a white hippie boy and then I saw exit wounds from M1 rifles out of the backs of two people I knew. Two of the four people who were killed, Jeffrey Miller and Allison Krause, were my friends. We were all running our asses off from these motherfuckers. It was total, utter bullshit. Live ammunition and gasmasks – none of us knew, none of us could have imagined ... They shot into a crowd that was running from them! . I got real, real pissed off.

“Devolution” is the philosophy Casale and Mothersbaugh developed using their art backgrounds to take a lefty and avant-garde riff on fin-de-siecle anti-Darwinism. A kind of Adorno-and-Horkheimer-inspired take on the otherwise conservative idea that the trappings of modern life create degeneracy in society, “the band’s devolutionist philosophy claims that the world is in a downward spiral of decadence, fuelled by moral decline, mechanisation, and overconsumption. Ultimately, mankind will dictate its own demise or devolution.” Parodying things like bourgeois white masculinity, postwar American media, and the like, Devo pointed out the absurdity and repressiveness of mainstream American popular culture. A state that would send in the military to shoot its own unarmed citizens for exercising their First Amendment rights is certainly a devolved one - the fact that these students were all white and at least well on their way to the middle class makes that devolution appear even more strong, as these students come from classes typically subject to both the law’s obligations and its protections.

Devo explicitly connected their playful devolutionary aesthetic to Dada. As Casale tells Simon Reynolds in Rip It Up and Start Again,

After Kent, it seemed like you could either join a guerrilla group like the Weather

Underground, actually try assassinating some of those evil people - the way THEY had murdered anybody in the sixties who’d tried to make a difference--or you could just make some kind of wacked-out creative Dada art response. Which is what Devo did (76-7).

Casale’s framing of Dada as “wacked-out” points to one key feature that Devo shares with its 20th century precursors: the reference to a prior consensus norm or reality that can then be spectacularly transgressed.

This shared sense of a common reality is being directly attacked by today’s media environment, where recommendation algorithms and AI deliver “personalized” content tailored to each individual’s niche tastes. The technical term for this is a “filter bubble,” which the BBC defines as “a space where our previous online behaviour (search history, likes, shares and shopping habits) influences what we see online and on our social media feeds and in what order.” There are many academic studies about the connection between algorithmic personalization, filter bubbles, and political polarization.

Algorithmic personalization amplifies a much older epistemic problem, one which pre-dates computers and even mass media. Philosopher Charles Mills calls this problem an “epistemology of ignorance”. Systemic oppression and power differentials lead so-called “consensus reality” to be modeled on the experiential reality of society’s most privileged and powerful group(s): their conseusus gets overgeneralized as everyone’s. Mills uses the language of “virtual reality” to describe how white people inhabit a world structured by white supremacy: they “live in an invented delusional world, a racial fantasyland, a ‘consensual hallucination,’ to quote William Gibson’s famous characterization of cyberspace, though this particular hallucination is located in real space” (The Racial Contract, 18). White supremacy organizes white people’s epistemic field such that their mistaken consensus (e.g., that racism is over, that colorblindness creates equity, etc.) counts as “reality” as such. For nearly all of its 300-ish year history, liberal consensus reality has been a white supremacist “consensual hallucination” naturalizing whiteness and white privilege.

It’s precisely that white consensual reality Devo targets. As Theo Cateforis has argued, new wave performers such as Devo used the figure of “nervousness,” traditionally associated with white people and white identity as

a space within which they could both celebrate and critique their cultural backgrounds, and also present a version of whiteness quite different from what had come to typify the societal norms of the 1970s…the appearance of new wave’s nervous front man in the late 1970s offered nothing less than an alternative masculinity, one whose greatest power derived from the ways it diverged from or contradicted what had become rock’s normative performative stance” (Are We Not New Wave? 80-82)

Devo’s nerdy nervousness was a critique of cock-rock style sexuality, which involved the white appropriation of stereotypical Black masculinity. Think of their cover of The Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction”: it’s all stilted and jerky, not frustrated and horny like the original. In this way, they drew attention to the normative assumptions behind rock star stereotypes of the day.

If Devo was attacking some common shared stereotypes and assumptions for their complicity in the hegemonic and devolutionist American culture, their project is vastly different than the one we face today in 2025. Their target was a mass-mediated white consensus reality; in the era of streaming, algorithmic personalization, filter bubbles, library and public school defunding, and the like, our task is instead to figure out how to build alternative ways of being and knowing in common.

And this time we can improve on old liberal bourgeois consensus reality. The task is to convince people that we depend on one another - that’s the actual reality that we need to get everyone to concede. The only way we can exist is if we do so together, in society. Existential phenomenology holds that the fact of human interdependence is the only “reality” not shaped by human cultural intervention; this is the point of Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity, if you want to read about this in more detail. Every aspect of human existence beyond this fact is up for grabs, and existing is the ongoing process of (re)negotiating that grab.

In addition to being just about the very minimum you need to get people to agree on to create a shared sense of reality, the idea that we all depend on one another is precisely the idea that everyone from AI boosters to manosphere influencers to tech platforms to most people in position of power in the US Federal Government are trying to destroy in order to better control and extract money from us.

I don’t think dada-esque nonsense is the thing we need in this specific moment. And the work that the arts can do to help create this minimum sense of shared reality is probably less representational and more practical. No matter what art says or depicts, the meaning it creates unfolds as people share experience of making and receiving it together: a band debates how a song should go, friends at a concert discuss whether the cover in the encore was better than the original, academics give papers at conferences about a painting’s use of color, and so on. Similarly, art only happens when people come together to make and distribute it. Participating in the arts ecosystem we can practice the kinds of interdependence that constitute the fundamental fact of human society. To make, share, and receive art is to participate in society. (Certainly this has been done in more and less equitable ways, but that’s again the whole issue of the continual renegotiation of the underlying fact of interdependence.) Exercising what Anna Kornbluh and Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado call our “right to culture” may be one of the most expedient and low-overhead/buy-in ways to start convincing people that we do in fact live in society. And although there are certainly forms of “bad faith” culture that denies our interdependence and sociality (think about that Nazi group chat recently uncovered by Politico, or if you know Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity, think of all those personas in chapter 2 who live in bad faith (the child, the nihilist, the adventurer, the serious man)), apart from that it really doesn’t matter WHAT the content of the culture you participate in is: maybe you have a group of friends with monthly progressive dinners, maybe you are in a band, maybe you have a weekly role-playing game session, whatever. Exercising our right to culture is an onramp to the more profound realization that we exist together in society, that fact is inescapable, and we shouldn’t be fooled into thinking otherwise.

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